Enumeration and Isolation of Beneficial Soil Microflora

5.1 Background Isolation of appropriate microbes is very essential before putting them through screening procedure. The initial step for isolation is to obtain the organism in pure culture without which, it cannot be considered for characterization. Enrichment of isolation culture is essential to isolate desired class of microorganisms where selective media is utilized for the pure culture of required specific strain. With the growing interest in exploration and exploitation of native microbes having antagonistic properties as biocontrol agents, research have been undertaken and efforts were also been made by the scientists in screening various native antagonistic microbial strains (Barthakur and Dutta, 1992; Ponmurugan and Baby, 2005; Mishra et al., 2005; Phukan et al., 2007; Ponmurugan et al., 2007) against many tea pathogens. In continuation of search for few newer strains of phosphate solubilising bacteria (PSB) (Awasthi et al., 2011) and actinomycetes strains from tea soil, the present work led to the isolation of beneficial microbes having possible antagonistic potentialities.